Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s globally distributed, horizontally partitioned, multi-model database service. The service is designed to allow customers to elastically and independently scale throughput and storage across any number of geographical regions. Azure Cosmos DB offers guaranteed low latency at the 99th percentile, 99.999% high availability, predictable throughput, and multiple well-defined consistency models. Azure Cosmos DB is the first and only globally distributed database service in the industry today to offer comprehensive Service Level Agreements (SLAs) encompassing all four dimensions of global distributions which our customers care the most: throughput, latency at the 99th percentile, availability, and consistency. As a cloud service, we have carefully designed and engineered Azure Cosmos DB with multi-tenancy, horizontal scalability and global distribution in mind.

We have just rolled out a few long-awaited changes and we wanted to share them with you:

Entry point for unlimited collections/containers is now 60% cheaper. In February, we’ve lowered entry point for unlimited containers making them 75% cheaper. We continue making improvements in our service and today we are pleased to announce that unlimited containers have now an entry point that is 60% cheaper than before. Instead of provisioning 2,500 RU/sec as a minimum, you can now provision an unlimited collection at 1,000 RU/sec and scale in increments of 100 RU/sec. Unlimited containers (collections) enable you to dynamically scale your provisioning from as low as 1,000 RU/sec to millions of RU/sec with no limit on storage consumption.

Provisioning massive amounts of throughput is now completely frictionless. Azure Cosmos DB’s design enables developers to elastically scale throughput across multiple geographical regions while maintaining the SLAs. The system is designed to scale throughput across regions and ensures that the changes to the provisioned throughput is instantaneous. To empower our users and their mission-critical workloads on Azure Cosmos DB, we are now allowing them to provision up to 1,000,000 RU/sec per container without raising a support request. This enables customers to elastically scale throughput based on the application traffic patterns across different geographical regions to support fluctuating workloads varying both by geography and time. The system manages the partitions transparently without compromising the availability, consistency, latency or throughput of an Azure Cosmos DB container.

Azure Cosmos DB is now available as a part of Microsoft Azure in France. Azure Cosmos DB is a foundational service in Azure powering mission-critical applications, services and customer workloads around the world. We are happy to announce that Azure Cosmos DB is a part of the preview of Microsoft Azure in France, which is now open to all customers, partners and ISVs worldwide giving them the opportunity to deploy services and test workloads against Azure Cosmos DB in these latest Azure regions. The new Azure Regions in France are part of our global portfolio of 42 regions in Azure. Azure Cosmos DB in the new regions will offer the same enterprise-grade reliability and performance with the industry-leading comprehensive SLAs to support the mission-critical applications and workloads of businesses and organizations in France. To sign up for Azure France preview, please visit here.

Azure Cosmos DB addresses fundamental data needs of all modern apps

Azure Cosmos DB is the database of the future – it is what we believe is the next big thing in the world of massively scalable databases! It makes your data available close to where your users are, worldwide. It is a globally distributed, multi-model database service for building planet scale apps with ease using the API and data model of your choice. You can Try Azure Cosmos DB for free today, no sign up or credit card required. If you need any help or have questions or feedback, please reach out to us on the developer forums on Stack Overflow. Stay up-to-date on the latest Azure Cosmos DB news and features by following us on Twitter #CosmosDB, @AzureCosmosDB.